


Voices of Survival

by Lord Starling (LordStarling)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Unfinished, apocalypse au, most likely eventual sexy times, plague survivors, post apocalyptic, the empty hospital, the rat king and the falling man, voices of survival
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-21
Updated: 2015-04-12
Packaged: 2018-03-18 21:37:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3584970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LordStarling/pseuds/Lord%20Starling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>5 years since the end of the world, since the borders of London were locked down under quarantine, forcing those inside to fend for themselves. For John Watson, a man with an immunity to the virus which swept the city with nearly a 100% fatality rate, it is a lonely apocalypse. Perhaps he is the only one left.</p><p>Perhaps he isn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Empty Hospital

The loud rattling of the security gate echoed and bounced far into the corridored belly of the empty hospital. Cursing, John Watson reached his uninjured arm through one of the diamond shaped holes to grapple around on the other side of the plate securing the point between each latticed door. There- a heavy padlock. He allowed it to rattle back against the metal as he withdrew, rummaging through his pack and tugging free a pair of bolt cutters. Pain lanced through his left arm as he attempted to apply the force needed to cut the lock. The awkward angle was no help, only adding to the strain. Setting down his bag, he adjusted the cutters, hooking the blunt-toothed end through the padlock and bracing one handle inside one of the metal diamonds. No less awkward, but as he applied his weight he felt the lock give slightly, and then completely. He barely caught himself as he fell backwards, the bolt cutters and padlock both falling to the ground with a loud clang that skittered away in every direction. The sound was like noisy rats, like spies alerting his position as he yanked the screeching door open to get to his bolt cutters on the other side. For a moment he was wary, afraid even, but the time of other people had been and gone, and the sounds he made had nobody to tell of his existence.

Methodically, he put his things back into his bag before hoisting it over his shoulder and heading toward the first room of this floor.

All in all the hospital seemed in pretty good nick; disregarding the upended boxes and beds. There was no obvious structural damage, no smashed windows save the ones near the front entrance, no doomsday messages on the walls, scrawls of paint made by people who seemed to think the most important part of the new plague was how circumstances could be bent to fit their image. John recalled the padlock on the security door; locked from the inside, and several flights up no less. Someone had gone to great lengths to make sure this place was secure, possibly out of habit, possibly in the hopes of one day returning.  
Momentarily he had the awful mental image of someone living here, alone, locking themself in as the virus took hold and leaving nothing but a corpse around the next corner, or the next one, somewhere just outside the reaches of his flashlight. He shivered the thought away. This hospital wasn't so far from the first quarantine line, where rows of field hospitals would have held all the transfers from here, along with an influx of the infected from miles around. As they go, it was an area with relatively few corpses, even after so much time.

The rooms nearest the gate were all empty. Not ransacked, merely cleaned out of anything useful and holding only bedframes, mattresses stripped of their covers. John considered spending the night here, but even in daylight the corridors were dark and mazelike. The hospital lay somewhere between comforting and nightmarish, familiar and eerily new. He would rather spare himself the discomfort of being here after the sun went down.  

John tentatively flicked a light switch as he moved into the storage area of this floor. No power, obviously. The habit had long since ceased to be useful. Without someone here to run the backup generator the hospital was doomed to darkness, that is if the thing was even operational anymore, which seemed unlikely given the constant maintenance and fuel supply the bloody things needed. He had always thought that were the world to end the first things to be fought over would be food, medicine. That power was something that could be lived without, even for a while, but when London went dark it had done so in the most inconvenient possible way: just as the coldest winter in years rolled in, biting with frost what wasn't already bitten by sickness. It had only taken a few weeks for the fuel war to start.

He moved further into the storage room, ignored the off-smell of long dead refrigerators. Five years since the virus had first struck, he noted silently. Four years, six months since the quarantine, getting shot at by bio-suited monsters if you tried to leave the city. The power out a month and a half after that, the riots and the fuel wars, the small gangs armed to the teeth, roaming the city, the quiet in the streets. The quiet was worst of all; lonely dead in lonely homes in a lonely city with nothing audible but the echoes of his own footsteps and the scurrying of rats. Two years, seven months, sixteen days since he last heard another voice.

He stopped thinking about it.

He looked instead at the shelves and boxes in front of him, this part the hospital surprisingly well stocked considering how thoroughly looted the ground floor had been. Most of the medicines well past their use-by date, but still, many of which some use might be made. He peered closer, shining his torch on the labels at risk of wasting precious batteries, the wan daylight filtering through the few small and grimy windows not even close to enough to read by. Largactil, Perphenazine, most of this shelf seemed to be antipsychotics. The next shelf, antidepressants. It made sense, he supposed, that the mental health ward of the hospital would be the one to remain stocked. There was hardly a lot here that could be used for first aid. He turned the corner and found himself proven wrong- a variety of medical supplies adorning several shelves at the back of the room like gifts strewn across ugly steel christmas trees. There- bandages. Painkillers. Antiseptic. He tore open the packaging on one of each, untying the rags wrapped around his left forearm and exposing the ragged cut underneath. He had kept it clean, of course, but the rusty door he had caught it on hadn't looked too sanitary, and he was well overdue for a tetanus booster. Any remaining vaccine would be well past expiry, but the hope of clean bandages and something to alleviate the pain had lead him to check out the nearest hospital in his trail. He looked up at the stacks of supplies; far too many to carry with him. It wouldn't be so bad to settle here, for a while at least, with everything he needed. A fire in one corner of the room, a cache of food on the shelves. But no, even now he could hear the ghosts of old lives on the winds, rattling through the empty rooms. The sting of the antiseptic on his arm felt good, a clean pain rather than the dull ache of a possible infection. Clean bandages around his arm, and a small pile of supplies to take with him. He could always come back.

He pulled from his bag an old road map, circling his location with a grimy red pen. 'St. Barts: Med sppls etc', in a scrawl as legible as possible. Stuffing what he could into his overflowing bag he clicked off his torch to conserve batteries, retracing his steps in the gloom with barely a pause for his eyes to adjust. He was good at this, this is what he was made for. Pressing on. If he thought for a second that the clattering of animals far off in the building could be another person, he ignored it, crushing down any phantom feeling of hope to avoid the familiar disappointment of finding nothing, feeling his way through the dark and back to the grey light of the sun.

We press on.


	2. The Rat King and the Falling Man

The clouds never seemed to lift anymore, but the sunlight, although wan and grey, still stung John's eyes as he left the hospital. He scratched at his beard as he felt the first few spots of rain begin to fall. He rarely bothered shaving anymore, there wasn't much of a point, but his facial hair was reaching the point of growth where the skin underneath was becoming dry and itchy. He hadn't thought to bring a razor in his back, but he had a cache of things in a house back the way he had came, and he vaguely remembered having stashed shaving supplies there. It was close enough to make it before dark, if he hurried. One of the hospital downpipes let out a loud gurgle as a wad of leaves and debris was unplugged by the weight of trapped rainwater. The dark edges of the sky seemed to creep forward ominously. Perhaps not. John reached into his bag, removing an anorak and again unfurling his somewhat grimy map. It was covered in a criss-crossing multitude of notes and markings; cache houses, supplies, dangerous zones of different qualities, many of them written neatly in the same pen, from when he had transferred his notes from a series of older maps. The rest varied in legibility, written as he had wandered about the city, exploring the vast labyrinth. This was a map of London like no other, a nomad's atlas, but the markings were thin in many areas, including the one in which he stood. The city was too big to be explored by one person. Tugging the anorak over his head, he decided to walk in the other direction on a whim, hoping to find somewhere interesting to spend the night. A million houses, a million apartments, but without people to populate them nowhere was particularly memorable. He folded the map carefully and replaced it, shouldering the bag he would once have found heavy, but which he now barely felt. Pulling on his hood, he set off.

Although he had the city to himself, John preferred to walk silently, listening. In this time at least; early on it had been dangerous to make any noise at all, every part of the city the territory of other people, hostile, sick, and afraid. Gangs forged by the vicious and ambitious in what had appeared to be a time of opportunity. Even then, John had been alone, slinking house to house like a ghost, listening by day to the sounds of looting, begging, desperate parties on empty streets, someone doing a burnout in a hijacked bus several blocks away. Night was worse. Fighting, screaming, sometimes streets away, sometimes one floor up, one floor down, next door, in the next room. Bodies appeared by morning where the day before there had been nothing. Sleep never came easy. Slowly, the city quietened, emptied. For a long time, he barely heard a thing, voices and human sounds growing more distant, and he was comforted by that distance, until one day he heard nothing at all for the hundredth time in a row, and ran the city calling out, searching until he fell, knowing full well it was too late, that the last of the voices had come and gone in his sleep. He used to sing to himself, crashing pots and pans together as he walked the streets just to hear the echoes, but the years soon hollowed out the ache left behind by loss, and he soon fell into the rhythm of the world around him. He could walk for hours upon hours, just listening to the quiet life reclaiming the city, the birds, the wind through the hollow streets, all of this became a part of him, etched into his soul the way his footprints marked the ground. He was London, past and present.

The rain fell around him in a quiet melody, the soft pattering that could go for hours before a downpour. Occasionally he allowed his feet to splash through a chain of puddles- his boots were sturdy and waterproof, and there was nobody around to see. Far ahead, shapes moved in the street, a pack of skinny dogs at play, chasing pigeons. Briefly, he considered trying to catch one, wondered if they still liked human company, but they were gone before he could even get near. On impulse, he turned right, walking in the middle of the road between the beetle-shells of cars. Residential buildings lined the street on either side. He picked the one with the least graffiti around the door and tried it. Locked. He took a step back and kicked hard, his weight crashing down through his foot, right by the lock. The door jolted but didn't open. He tried again, putting more power into it, and this time the door gave, bursting open into a hallway and bouncing off the wall. He caught it before it could hit him, entering the house. The stairwell was dim, but not dim enough to warrant wasting valuable batteries on light. He followed the stairs upward, not really taking stock of his surroundings, just meandering in hope of finding something interesting. A landing, a door, again locked, but one which gave far more easily than the outer door. It was darker in here, but a quick click of his torch revealed closed curtains behind a jumble of furniture. He moved across the room, sliding his feet carefully in front of him so as not to trip. When his legs bumped into the edge of a table he reached forwards, grappling at the fabric of the curtains to allow the grey light in. The room was the lounge of a flat, and a fairly large and expensive one, by the looks of things. He noted the broken furniture, the rips in the carpet. If the door hadn't been locked he would have said the place had been looted, but when he wandered into the kitchen it seemed mostly untouched. He found a can opener in one of the drawers, and tucked into his pack. The pantry was empty. He moved on, looking for a bedroom in which to set up camp for the night. The first door he tried was a bathroom. The second room was as dark as the lounge had been when he had entered. John fished the torch out of the belt pouch he had made for it, aiming it into the room and clicking the button quickly; on-off.

His breath caught in his throat as his body went cold, hands grappling at the knife at his side as he scrambled away from the door. He waited, back against the wall, hyper-aware of his heartbeat, his harsh breathing, every sound and movement around him. He knew what it was he had seen, had already thought over the image a thousand times in the brief few seconds since the brief flash of light, but his body felt like the lid sealed to a frozen jar, wound too tight to budge. Slowly, he aimed the torch and knife both into the dark doorway. He could feel his pulse in his fingertips as he hesitantly pushed the button of his torch, allowing the bright beam to illuminate the room.

Three corpses, little more than skeletons. Two lay curled on the stained and rotten bed. One of them was very small. The third, the one he had burned into his mind's eye with that first flash of the torch, sat on the floor, propped against the foot of the bed and held up by dry sinews, the remains of pyjamas clinging to an empty frame, like a grotesque mannequin. Several bullet holes decorated the back wall, but John could barely skim them with his gaze before his eyes were drawn back to the corpse, whose empty sockets seemed to stare at him accusingly- how dare you come into my house, and treat it as your own. How dare you take my things, desecrate my tomb, my family's tomb, how dare you be alive. This world is not yours. It belongs to the dead.

Retching, John staggered back into the lounge, down the stairs, his feet slipping and shaking as he ran without looking. It was only when he made it outside that he noticed that his torch was still on. He clicked it off and shoved it back into his belt in disgust. "Yuck yuck yuck YUCK YUCK!" He shouted, jolting his entire body in a ridiculous dance as if he could rid himself of the experience by shaking it off of himself. He had seen dead people before, many times, hell, he had MADE people dead, but revulsion has no inoculation, and he couldn't help the crawling feeling that he needed to get as far away from the place as possible. He yanked up his hood and marched off down the street.

The pounding of his feet against the ground fell into a rhythm, and his heart eventually began to slow. Streets turned into other streets, and the rain turned into a downpour, rivulets streaming down the surface of his anorak, dripping from his hair and over his face. He wasn't sure how far he had walked, or how long for, but he couldn't help the feeling that he was close to circling back around on himself. He stepped under the shelter of a building and took out his map, checking it with the street signs around him. He was only a few streets away from the British Museum, oddly enough. He supposed he should have recognised the streets, but this London was not the old London, and nothing was familiar enough to be noteworthy. John didn't want to go into any more houses. The museum was as good a destination as any, since it was starting to get dark, whether from the rain or the oncoming night. He returned his map to its spot and walked on.

The empty columns of the museum looked like the remains of some ancient ruin, dropped right in the middle of a city of towering modern ruins. An old god of abandoned buildings. Inside, the walls were blackened, soot from a large fire decorating the whole place. Or an explosion, perhaps. John didn't know what anyone could have burned to blacken such a large space, but it was getting a little dark to really see what had happened, and he couldn't really bring himself to care anyway. He didn't go far inside, instead finding a dry corner as close to the entrance as possible without being completely exposed. Suddenly exhausted, he lay out his anorak and trousers to dry, making a dinner of cold canned food retrieved from his pack, canned beans for tea, canned peaches for desert. When it got too dark to see, he crawled into his sleeping bag and listened to the distant sounds of the rain and the city, empty, but wildly alive and full of the past.

  
He was underground.

The underground was dark and he couldn't see, but he could hear them all around him, moving about without a single utterance. Scurrying. He reached to his belt to retrieve his torch, panicking when it was nowhere to be found. He tried to get up, his head hitting something else as he moved forward. The torch had somehow wandered right in front of his face. He clicked it on, afraid for a moment that he had wasted the batteries when he hadn't turned it off in the house but the beam shone sure and true. He still couldn't see. The torch lit only more darkness, the light meaningless without anything to shine on. He could hear them all around him. He stood and shone the torch at the floor, and saw that it was moving. Rats everywhere, all running in the same direction. Running away. He wanted to run with them, to get away from the thing that was coming, but he couldn't lift his feet from the floor. His breath caught as they sped up, flowing around him like a river, a living tide rising around his ankles, his knees, his waist.

The Rat King emerged from the darkness. A dozen huge bodies attached at the tail, each head crowned with black feathers above glowing eyes, bloody teeth. The Rat King pulled at the spiderwebs around his feet, leading away into the darkness of the tunnels, dragging itself forward. He didn't make a sound, but one at a time the heads turned to look at him. A dozen mouths spoke in unison, one creature, many bodies.

_Poor little soldier boy. All alone in the dark._

The King dragged himself forwards, forwards, forwards. Every word seemed to repeat, sticking to him like tar in a voice that was more felt than heard. The other rats were all gone.

_Poor little boy. Don't you know that the dark is mine? These tunnels are mine. This city is mine. This plague is MINE!_

His gun was by his side, where he usually kept his knife. He drew it, pointing it at the Rat King, which laughed, the wild and maniacal sound filling the echoes, the tunnels, his ears, his heartbeat.

He fired the gun with his eyes closed. The laughter stopped abruptly, cut off by the gunshot.

He opened his eyes, and the Rat King was gone. He lifted a foot to kick off the spiderwebs.

Someone grabbed him from behind, hugging him too tight and too hot, fingers digging into his ribs. He struggled to get away, struggled to breathe, to scream, but he couldn't even move. A mouth against his neck, a gleeful voice in his ear.

_Now you're mine too._

His torch was pressed into his stomach. He couldn't see, but he could feel them all around him. Feel the winds rushing through the tunnel as if before an oncoming train. The thing holding him screamed in anger as something rushed forward from the darkness, a silhouette in front of a sourceless light. It hovered just above the floor, the shadow of a falling man, arms windmilling, hair and clothes flapping above him as he fell without moving.

_This is MINE!_

The Rat King was holding him too tight, arms around body, his legs, hands around his throat, holding in his breath. A deep voice rattled dust from the roof of the tunnels, from his bones.

"He belongs to the world above."

Lights glowed in place of eyes in the silhouette of the falling man. A hand plucked him from the grasp of the creature, and they were falling upwards, up through the tunnel roof, through the dirt, through the ground, through the air...


End file.
